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Kléya Rice says her phone rings every other day from unknown numbers. She answers in a panic, unsure if it’s Rony Dieujuste — her partner and the father of her two children — calling from an undisclosed detention center with only minutes to talk.

The usual recording that reveals a caller’s location hasn’t played on any recent calls, she said. Over the past month, Rice has become Dieujuste’s sole advocate. He’s a Haitian immigrant now facing deportation, along with his parents — though, unlike their son, they aren’t in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. The uncertainty has added more pressure as Rice works to keep their family together.

Rice spends most of her days caring for their two young children: a 10-month-old son and a 23-month-old daughter. As a registered nurse in Palm Beach County, Florida, she’s overwhelmed trying to juggle her career, motherhood, and Dieujuste’s absence. The babies are Dieujuste’s third and fourth children born in the United States. His oldest, a 9-year-old daughter, was born in Haiti. His second child is from a previous marriage to an American citizen.

During an interview, their oldest child calls for her daddy. 

“Da da, da da,” the little girl repeated. Her voice rose as Rice recalled a previous call with Dieujuste since she last heard from him on May 30, bringing tears to her eyes.

“It’s hard to navigate all of this,” said Rice, 41. By “this,” she meant the immigration system that detained Dieujuste, after he was pulled over by police while on his way home from a family member’s graduation party on May 30 in Palm Beach County on suspicion of driving under the influence. Since then, neither Rice nor his family has seen him.

There are over 500,000 Haitian immigrants under Temporary Protective Status lost in the immigration court system, said Guerline M. Jozef, founder and executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance, on a monthly call hosted by Black Lives Matter Grassroots on June 12. Haitians with TPS status have until Aug. 3 to reregister, according to ICE officials.  

“These are people who are here legally, with legal status,” and yet, they’re still being detained, Jozef said.

Dieujuste was arrested by ICE on May 30 for allegedly violating the terms of his admission to the U.S. as a “nonimmigrant” and will remain in its custody pending completion of immigration proceedings, a spokesperson confirmed to Capital B in an email on June 23. 

For generations, people from the Caribbean have migrated to the United States — some directly from their home islands, others through countries like Canada or the United Kingdom. Today, under President Donald Trump’s deportation policies, families like Dieujuste’s are living in fear, often unaware of the whereabouts of their detained or deported loved ones. 

“I didn’t know this would be part of my story,” Rice said. 

It’s not just Haitian-born immigrants from West Indian islands living in the United States who are under threat of deportation. In May, a judge decided that Marlon Parris, a U.S. green card holder from Trinidad and Tobago since 1997 and an Army veteran, can be deported, KJZZ, a local public radio station, reported. Parris spent five years in prison for a nonviolent drug offense and was released in 2016, but that has triggered his deportation proceedings. 

Capital B reached out via email to ICE and confirmed Dieujuste is in their custody in California. Capital B has reached out via email to the Executive Office of Immigration Review for his next court appearance, which is open to the public. Both agencies informed Capital B that without having Dieujuste’s “alien registration number,” which isn’t given out to the public, his case information is not available. 

“He has been having nose bleeds for days”

“A lot is happening. Families are being separated,” Jozef said with a warning. “This is a real issue we are facing. This is not about immigration. Because at the same time, they [the federal government] are welcoming people from South Africa, who happen to look like them with blue eyes and blonde hair. That is the reality.”

From a detention center in Miami, Dieujuste told Rice he had been shackled alongside other non-English-speaking, nonwhite men and flown on a Southwest Airlines flight to what he believed was another detention facility in Fort Worth, Texas, on June 8. 

Rice has tried to track Dieujuste’s movements using ICE’s detainee locator system. The phone calls come in at random hours, and information is limited. Keeping up has been overwhelming. She didn’t think to take screenshots, but her photographic memory helps her recall some of the legal language she’s now learning.

Rice said Dieujuste’s immigration attorney has attempted to schedule in-person or video visits, only to find that by the time a meeting is confirmed, he’s already been transferred to another facility. 

The ICE custody transportation industry is run by “a handful of large conglomerates notorious for varied types of abuses across the world,” according to Bianca Tylek, author of The Prison Industry: How It Works and Who Profits. Some of those abuses came to light in a 2017 class action lawsuit filed on behalf of 92 Somali deportees, who were held on a plane for nearly 24 hours handcuffed, denied restroom access, and assaulted.

“Paid per person per mile, correctional and immigration detention transportation corporations guard their bottom lines by overcrowding vans, taking extended routes, avoiding stops, and ignoring the needs of their shackled passengers,” wrote Tylek, founder of the advocacy group Worth Rises, a nonprofit that opposes mass incarceration and the exploitation of incarcerated people. “With few government protections or legal remedies available to those harmed, these corporations create some of the most inhumane conditions for incarcerated and detained people.” 

Rice wouldn’t find out where Dieujuste was for hours, Rice said, wiping away tears during a Zoom interview with Capital B on June 12. She spent hours refreshing the locator site. Rice couldn’t hold back her tears when she talked about the poor quality of food like stale bread he said he has been served and her concerns about the air quality. 

“He has been having nose bleeds for days and he hasn’t seen a doctor,” Rice said as she used a Kleenex tissue to pick up her glasses and catch her tears. “They’re all wearing masks. Other Spanish-speaking men told Rony their noses have been bleeding for weeks.”

Nosebleeds has been a known complaint from detainees in ICE custody. There are a handful of organizations that are focusing on Black immigrants, and “the Haitian Bridge Alliance is at the forefront,” Josef said. 

“It has been devastating watching my little sister go through this,” Shani Simpson, 43, told Capital B on the same Zoom call with Rice. She told Capital B it has been “frightening” and “heartbreaking” to watch Rice — and other friends and families in the Caribbean diaspora, who took pride in obtaining U.S. citizenship — try their “very best to understand what’s going on through a very complicated and intricate immigration process.”

“He is breaking”

Dieujuste, 36, left Haiti in September 2018 in search of a better life for himself and his then infant daughter. After settling in Florida with another woman, not Rice, they fell in love, married and had his second child, Rice told Capital B. 

Dieujuste, a skilled contractor and master electrician, once built hotels along the coast in Haiti. In Florida, he worked as a handyman at a country club in Boca Raton. 

His marriage quickly fell apart, however. During the divorce, his then-wife accused him of immigration fraud, which triggered a review of his permanent residency status by immigration authorities.

“He kept that from me,” Rice, who is of Jamaican descent, said. 

After a cousin’s graduation party on May 30, Dieujuste got behind the wheel and was pulled over in Lake Worth.

Not fully understanding the officer’s questions — English isn’t his first language — Dieujuste admitted to drinking and was arrested. Bail was set at $1,000, but Rice noticed online that he’d been placed on a 48-hour hold. She Googled the term and panicked. He wasn’t allowed to post bail to go home, pending ICE investigating his status. 

“They tried to pressure him to sign papers to give up his rights. He said they’re still trying to get him to sign the paperwork,” Rice said through tears, grateful he refused and asked for his attorney.

As of their June 14 call, Dieujuste was at Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, California, which is owned and operated by Management & Training Corp., a private company, according to online records.

It’s unclear when Dieujuste’s next court appearance will be. If a judge grants him bond while he awaits deportation proceedings, Rice says she’s been told to expect amounts “upwards of $30,000 or more. They’ve been setting bonds extremely high — for people with no criminal record.”

“The private prison model does not differ much from the corrections system to the immigration detention system. Business is still driven by more bodies, longer stays, and low costs,” Tylek wrote in her book, released by the New Press in April 2025. “Private immigration detention centers suffer from many of the same problems as private prisons and jails, but the people held in them have even fewer rights and thus, at times, can suffer even more abuse.”

The facility Dieujuste is currently in has been known for their food services needing improvement, according to an August 2022 inspection report from the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman. 

“I told him to remain strong,” she said, adding, “But he is breaking. I can hear it in his voice and feel it in his spirit.”